Tag Archives: hints

The long awaited Witcher 3 was just released. This third and final installment introduces open world gameplay, and though some aspects of the game have been streamlined, there’s still a lot to learn as you’re playing. Here are a few tips I’ve learned as I’ve been playing. I’ve played on normal, on XB1. This post is spoiler free.

General

The Bestiary is important. Unlike most games, it doesn’t just give history but actual useful information. Before fighting monsters, check the bestiary for its weaknesses to certain items, bombs, or signs.

When you pick up books, make sure to give them a read before you ditch them, they may add something to your Bestiary.

Meditate. You can do it pretty much anywhere out of combat. It will refill your health (on most difficulties), and restock your potions.

You can usually find armor and weapon enhancers in towns or outposts, use them when you see them for a temporary upgrade.

If you’re short on money, keep an eye out for treasures and caches on the map.

If you come across a monster nest you need to destroy, walk up to it and you should get a button prompt. Don’t just toss bombs at it.

Travel

You can fast travel at signposts, but do it too often and you’ll risk missing things out in the world.

If you’re mounted you can hold down A and your horse will follow the path without having to be steered.

You can fight while mounted.

Items

Pick up everything (but don’t spend hours picking flowers, unless that’s what you’re into). The inventory UI isn’t great, but you can generally use items to craft things, or disassemble them into crafting mats.

You only need to make things like potions once. After this, they are replenished during meditation using alcohol.

An item called Potion of Clearance will let you reassign your skill points, but costs 1000g. The first place I found one of these was Keira’s hut.

Repair your equipment when you can, but don’t waste money repairing the junk you plan to sell or disassemble. Repair kits are also sold and come in handy in dungeons.

Leveling and Quests

In this game, you have to ‘equip’ skills, and in the beginning you only get 3. So it’s best to pick a couple favourite abilities (I like to focus on fast attacks and Igni) and put many points into them rather than spreading them out over many abilities.

Equip a mutagen that will buff your most important equipped skills (they’ll be the same colour).

Do all the available side quests before you face your first big enemy. Experience and gold were a bit hard to come by at the start of the game.

Check the bounty board in each new town.

Secondary quests can vary wildly in level. Make sure you check the level of the quest before tackling it, you generally want to be within 2 levels of it.

Combat

This is the first Witcher game where you have a ranged weapon, so don’t forget about it. While it doesnt do a lot against armored enemies, it’s good when things are out of range or in the air.

Dodge a lot. Parry enemies with swords. Attack from the back.

You’ll sometimes have a companion with you in combat – let them serve as a distraction so you can attack from the back.

This War of Mine can be a very challenging game, especially when you first start playing. Here are some things I learned that may help you. When I play, I focus on avoiding combat as much as possible, so keep that in mind.

To Start…

Collect all the items from around your house.

Build a metal workshop, and use it to craft a crowbar so you can get into all the locked doors in the house.

If you find lockpicks, don’t waste them here as they are single use and can be traded or used while scavenging if you need to be quiet.

Other items to prioritize crafting are: a stove (which can and should be upgraded when possible) and a bed. If it’s cold (check the temperature in the top left of the screen) a simple heater is also very important.

You don’t really need a shovel to clear rubble. It makes it faster, but it’s not like your social calendar is full.

Scavenging

The descriptions of each area on the map are quite accurate – they’ll tell you if you can trade, will be in danger, or may need to steal.

When visiting a location for the first time, don’t bring anything with you, as it will reduce the number of inventory slots available to bring things back. Look around, figure out what tools you’ll need to collect everything, and bring them next time you go.

It’s best to clear out a whole location before moving on to the next, especially at the beginning of the game.

Avoid fighting when you can, and leave yourself a clear way to the exit in case you need to run away.

You can tell when someone is near you by red radar-like blips in their location. If the movements of the red circles are erratic, frequent, and small it’s likely just a rat.

Head home by 3 or 4am, otherwise you risk being shot by snipers.

Characters

Many characters have special skills that will help you out. Make sure you’re using the correct people for each task to make the most efficient use of your resources.

Boris is strong but slow. He has 17 inventory slots making him a great choice for scavenging. His strength will also help if you get into melee combat.

Bruno is a good cook. Use him to cook food, distill moonhine/alcohol, and make medicine.

Katia has bargaining skills. Use her for trading.

Marin is a handyman. Use him to craft things in the workshop and metal workshop.

Marko is a good scavenger. He has 15 inventory slots and scavenges faster.

Roman is trained in combat. He’s a good choice if you expect to have to fight on scavenging runs, or for guarding your house. Roman can get into fights with your other characters resulting in injuries, which is a big downside to a playthrough with him in it.

Zlata can bolster spirits. Give her a guitar or have her talk to other characters to cheer them up.

Keeping people Healthy and happy

If a character displays icons above their head, another character can talk to them to give them the items they need, or comfort them.

If the Hospital is a location option an injured or sick character can be healed for free.

Keep the temperature up in the house to avoid sickness.

The best way to heal an injury or sickness is to give a bandage/medicine then let the character sleep in bed for the night.

Having books and armchairs available will make characters happier.

Helping neighbours or friendlies you run into while scavenging will increase morale for most characters.

A quick and easy way to boost morale is to trade the doctor at the hospital and let him get the best of the deal (this will be considered a donation). He wants medicine or bandages.

Cigarettes and coffee will relax the characters who like these things (it will say it in their profile).

Stealing from or killing friendlies, or refusing people help will decrease morale.

Weapons

Even if you don’t plan on fighting while scavenging, you will need weapons to defend your house from raids.

A knife is a good thing to make with your first weapon parts.

When you can, you’ll also want to build/get some kind of gun.

Crowbars,shovels, and hatchets can also be used for house defense, but aren’t as effective as a knife or gun.

Once you have a hatchet you will also see that you can chop up furniture in your house for wood/fuel. Be careful that you don’t use the hatchet to destroy furniture you’ve built.

Food

Canned food is very valuable for trading.

Set an animal trap to for a semi-regular source of meat.

Get vegetables whenever you can, as they will make cooking much more efficient.

items

Bandages and medicine are very valuable for trading if you have extra.

Build each type of crafting table when you can, and upgrade them so you can be more self-sufficient.

The exception is the two stills which I didn’t find to be worth building, unless you plan to do a lot of trading at the military base.

Wood and components are needed to build pretty much everything, but only stack to 2 and 4, making it hard to get enough from scavenging. To get a bulk supply of these, you can trade Franko when he comes to your house.

Other Tips

The Hospital will get attacked through the game and you can find medicine in the rubble. This will not be considered stealing.

During winter, make sure your heater is upgraded and full of fuel all the time.

Build a radio and check it all stations daily. It will tell you if raids are likely and you should put extra guards on, or what the weather will be like. It might give you an idea of when the war will end. It can also be left on a music station to relax the survivors.

Board up your house to keep it more secure from raids.

If you don’t have any smokers or coffee drinkers you can trade in these items.

You only lose if all of your starting character die or leave. You can still make it if some of them do, though morale will be affected.

That’s all for now! Let me know if you need more info, or if you have any tips for me.

Dragon Age: Inquisition came out last week and I’ve been playing it. A lot. Pretty much every waking moment, except when I feel bad and temporarily relinquish the TV to my boyfriend so he can play NES. To be honest, the game didn’t quite capture me like Dragon Age Origins did at first, and a lot of that had to do with pacing. The thing is, the game is gigantic and very open world so the player dictates the pace. You could zoom through the story relatively quickly, or you could spend 15 hours exploring every inch of the starting area and wondering if perhaps there are more important things for an Inquisitor to do than pick every Elfroot in Ferelden. Dragon Age is full of pet peeves for me, and it did take some work to get past them and let the huge, detailed world and wonderfully written characters suck me in.

Here are some things I wish I had known before playing the game that would have made my starting experience much better. For more tips, see my second post.

Character Creation

Choose your class wisely, especially if you want to be able to experience all of the interactions between your companions. I’m playing as a rogue, which was a bad choice for this. In combat, you pretty much will always need a warrior to draw threat (even if they aren’t a shield tank) and a mage who can cast barriers (basically Power Word: Shield) in your party. There’s no healing in this game, besides limited use potions, so barriers are very important. A rogue you can honestly take or leave, and I’m finding being one myself really limits the possible party comps. I’d love to see the interactions between Sera, who’s quite daft, and Cole, the friendly ghost, but they’re both rogues as well, and having a party where 3 of 4 characters are rogues is very hard to work with.

That said, rogues have some super fun abilities like Smoke Bombs and Leaping Shot which lets you backflip out of danger, firing a hail of arrows in your wake.

When you play as a rogue or warrior you get 2 sub-class options (archer vs. stabby stab, sword & board vs. 2H), but these don’t lock you into anything, it just decides what weapon you start with.

I don’t particularly like the look of the character I created. She looked okay on the creation screen, but in-game I’m less impressed. Play through the intro and don’t be afraid to restart if you want to change appearance. Better to do it 15 minutes in than be like me and wish you had done things differently 40 hours in.

Story and characters

Leave the Hinterlands. Really. Do it. I wish I had read this article earlier. I probably spent a good 10 hours exploring, closing rifts, and picking up every herb/ore/item I could find. It got boring. It made me think DA:I was a bad game. Hinterlands has been one of the least engaging areas, as it has so much collection to do and pretty much every quest you get comes from a note on a dead body. If you’re like me, uncompleted objectives on your map are an anathema to you, but The Hinterlands isn’t going anywhere. Complete a few objectives, do the quests that will get you access to mounts, but as soon as the game is starting to feel like a slog, go progress the story forward. It’ll make the game much more enjoyable. Also, you’ll get some side quests that send you back to Hinterlands later.

Do the first quest in Val Royeaux before you start exploring The Hinterlands too thoroughly. In my game I found Redcliffe in the Northern Hinterlands before I went to Val Royeaux and it resulted in some very immersion-breaking story gaps. Someone in VR is supposed to send you to Redcliffe, and the game doesn’t recognize or adapt to you doing things in the wrong order.

Gather all possible companions early so you can get to know and love them, and have a variety of party comps to choose from. You can miss some of them if you wait too long. Here’s how to find each of the extra companions:

Vivienne – The Imperial Enchanter quest given by a mage in Val Royeaux.

Iron Bull – The Captain of the Chargers quest is given to you by a messenger outside the Haven chantry, and sends you to The Storm Coast.

Blackwall – The Lone Warden quest, given by Leliana which sends you to the Hinterlands.

Dorian – Will be found in Redcliffe when you meet with Fiona if you side with the Mages, or will appear automatically at another time if you side with the Templars.

Cole – Will be found in The Fade if you side with the Templars, or will appear automatically at another time if you side with the Mages.

These are the main quests, so you can pace out how the story will progress. Story quests will have a recommended level range listed when you see them in the War Room:

The Wrath of Heaven

The Threat Remains

Champions of the Just or In Hushed Whispers

In Your Heart Shall Burn

From the Ashes

Here Lies the Abyss

Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts

What Pride Had Wrought

The Final Piece

(Minor story spoiler) You can only do one of Champions of the Just or In Hushed Whispers. Do Champions if you want the Templars to join your cause, or Whispers if you want the mages. You can’t have both.

I suggest moving the story forward to From the Ashes fairly soon. It was at this point that the story really became interesting, and I began to care about my character and her cause. If you find yourself feeling unengaged while exploring and doing side-quests, doing the story quests up to this point should fix that.

Inventory and other stuff

In your inventory, Valuables are the equivalent to junk in the previous DA games. Not sure why they changed this. Put everything you want to sell in here so they can be sold all at once.

Another annoying thing about valuables is that the category is applied not just to actual junk, but also to research items that you should be turning in. So drop by the research table before you start selling en-masse. (Thank to @ArielleEJ for this tip)

The inventory system is not great, and you will get a ton of crappy gear drops. If you’re playing on normal (or easy) you don’t have to worry too much about gear, I definitely don’t recommend letting it consume too much of your time if it’s something you don’t enjoy. Junk (or ‘valuable’) all the white/common gear, and just focus on the better stuff. Every couple of hours I go back to my home base, see if anything new is an upgrade for anyone and sell everything else. I generally avoid crafting unless someone has weapons that are vastly inferior to the rest of the party.

Upgrades are generally worthwhile, but don’t spend too much time on them. Just slap on whatever will fit on your character’s gear. You can also remove upgrades (but not runes) from gear you will be selling.

The one piece of gear that does warrant more attention is Varric’s crossbow, Bianca. He’ll have this weapon all game, so you should buy or craft upgrades for it as you can.

Though I’m not into scrutinizing the stats on gear, the appearance of the gear is well worth paying attention to. Bioware did some killer work on armor this time around. Leliana’s armor is perfection, and most of the other character’s armor is also both beautiful and functional looking. It’s truly exciting to be a female rogue who does not have bare legs.

Inventory is limited, so I highly recommend taking the 2 Tailoring Inquisition perks when you can, which will give you an extra 30 slots. Especially if you’re like me and pick up everything in sight.

I think I’ve given myself a repetitive strain injury by constantly pushing L3 to search for hidden items. Unless you’re desperate to find every herb/ore, give your hand a break. Your companions will say something when there is an important hidden item around.

The addition of jumping in the game is nice for those who can’t keep still, but it also brings up a lot of Mako-reminiscent, cliff scaling frustrations. I don’t really have tips to avoid this, just a warning. Though mounts are a bit better at climbing things than you are on foot.

Once upon a time, back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, before the Internet was a big thing, getting help when you were stuck in a game was not easy. The first game I remember getting stuck on was Maniac Mansion. When I got stuck, there wasn’t a lot of help available. Basically I just had to keep trying new things. Sure it was frustrating but, looking back through wistful rose-coloured glasses, it was also kinda nice. I had to figure things out myself.

However, my gaming hobby had barely gotten started before the era of figuring things out yourself started getting eclipsed by the business of game hints. In 1989 Sierra introduced their new hint line – for only $0.75 for the first minute and $0.50 for every additional minute, you could talk to someone who would tell you how to get through their games. I don’t believe I ever called them, but only because I didn’t have a credit card when I was 8. Gaming magazines, like Nintendo Power had sections dedicated to hints and strategies. Prima Games started making strategy guides in 1990, and their guides for challenging games like Myst sold like hotcakes. Hints were on TV too. If you were lucky enough to be a Canadian with access to YTV, Nicholas Picholas would share Turbo Tips with you every week on Video & Arcade Top 10, which premiered in 1991. In 1995 GameFAQs was created, which really got the ball rolling on internet game walkthroughs and guides.

Access to information is great, but when does it become too much? When does it begin to hinder enjoyment of a game rather than enhance it?

Let’s talk about World of Warcraft for a bit. When I first started playing World of Warcraft, one of the coolest things about it was the amount of exploration I could do. Everything was new to me. Every zone had new things to look at, and every quest (whose text I needed to read in order to know where to go) told a new story. There were little surprises, like treasure chests you could find scattered about. Sure, they rarely had anything exciting in them but just finding them and anticipating the contents as you opened them was exciting. Doing dungeons or killing a rare I stumbled upon and having a blue piece of loot for me was unexpected and rewarding. One of my favourite early memories from the game was finding and completing the questline that eventually rewarded me with the Sprite Darter Hatchlings. The quest-giver was quite hidden, so it felt like a secret. Not everyone had one, so it felt special.

If you asked me to name a time something unexpected or surprising happened to me in WoW over the last few expansions, I’d be hard pressed to think of one. What happened? Information overload happened. The Sprite Darter Hatchling questline (if it still existed) could never stay hidden, you’d see a big yellow exclamation point on your map as you came near it. Getting stuck on a quest became near impossible as your map would highlight the area you needed to go. Reading the quest text and actually knowing what was happening in the story became a thing of the past for me, since it was no longer required.

Mods were created that gave you information in-game that you’d otherwise not have access to. With AtlasLoot Enhanced, I could see the loot table of every boss I fought. Good drops were no longer an unexpected delight, because I knew where they all came from. Bad drops became infinitely more disappointing because I knew when they came at the expense of a drop I really wanted. Rare mobs stopped being interesting as soon as I downloaded RareSpawn Overlay so I could see where every one of them spawned and NPC Scan which would blast noise at me as soon as one was in range so I didn’t even need to pay attention to the game. Mists of Pandaria introduced treasures and BoA items you could find around the map. These were fun, until I realized it was much more efficient to check the Wowhead guide and see a map which pinpointed every single one, or download TomTom and be navigated right to them.

Further than just information about objects, there’s also a ton of information available about how to play your character. IcyVeins will tell you how to spec and ability priorities. Mods like SpellFlash will tell you what spell to cast next. Even the default UI will make your spell icons flash when an ability is ready to use. Raid healing was always my favourite thing because it required some decision-making and quick reactions on my part, but even those requirements are reduced by DBM counting down every major ability I need to know about or GTFO screaming when I stand in bad things.

Looking up the information or installing an addon is so much more efficient than trying to figure things out or find things yourself. But it is not more fun. Sure, you could just not use addons, not use Wowhead, but that’s a lot like telling someone who complained about content nerfs to just turn off the Dragon Soul buff. Technically possible, but not bloody likely. Why should you handicap yourself?

For a game with such a huge, beautiful world there’s actually very little to discover in WoW that you can’t find in a database first. Exploration can seem like a waste of time. With PTRs, Betas, and datamining, it’s even possible to learn everything there is to know about a new content patch or expansion – every item, achievement, cinematic, quest – before it’s even released.

Of course, WoW is not the only game that can be ruined by having too much information easily accessible. With all the walkthroughs, FAQs and video guides available, it’s possible to ruin almost any game. Information is good and sometimes a game will really stump me so I’m happy it’s there. However, there’s a thin line between access to info that prevents me from banging my head against a wall for too long, and having so much information available that I never have to actually think for myself. I played a puzzler called The Bridge a couple of weeks ago and I really enjoyed it. At first. The puzzles were all based on gravity, sometimes momentum, and solving them in the first few levels made me feel accomplished, especially as they got more challenging. But then came a puzzle that I played around with for a good 10 minutes and I couldn’t figure out how to solve it. So I looked up a video, got the solution and went on my way. The next puzzle that stumped me I only tried for a couple of minutes. I mean, I had already found a cool video guide that had all the answers, doesn’t hurt to take another peek, right? By the end of the game I was sitting at my computer, right hand on the keyboard, left hand holding my iPhone as a video walked me through the solutions to all of the last puzzles. This is not fun. This is not gaming. I want to think, want to have to try, but all the answers are right there. Looking up the answers is so fast and easy.

I lack self-control when it comes to spoilers, though the pervasive presence of guides makes me think I’m not the only one. Once I’ve looked up a solution, it becomes very hard not to do it again for that game. Soon I’m not even enjoying the game, I’m just following a set of directions from point A to point B.

When it comes to availability of this information there’s no going back, but it does make me miss the days when finding that information was just a little bit harder and thinking for yourself felt more encouraged.